Acknowledgements:

In introducing the following work, I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory on which we learn, work, and resource from at Columbia University School of Social Work is land of the Lenape and Wappinger indigenous peoples. Let us commit ourselves to the struggle against the forces that have dispossessed the Lenape, Wappinger, and other indigenous people of their lands.

I would also like to acknowledge professor Kelsey Reeder and their facilitation of SOCW T7102. If this is all Professor Reeder reads, it has been a great joy to learn from them in the process of developing my radical visions for social work and topics of human sexuality and sex education. With Prof. Reeder's lecturers, recommended readings, and guidance, this creative piece took form. Moreover, all my peers in class who contributed to discussions and building ideas that related to the present topic. This semester was far from normal, but we persisted together and that is what I will be taking away at the least. With these acknowledgements, I present the following work of my own.

A Future of Flesh, Care, and Curriculum: Social Work at Intersections of Human Sexuality and Sex Education

In the future we strive to create, social workers are not simply intermediaries between the margins and systems, but architects capable of radically transforming them. They do not approach human sexuality with the tools of compliance and correction but rather with language shaped by liberation, attuned to bodies and minds in all their contradictions, capacities, and complexities. The systems they work within are fluid, no longer defined by extraction or surveillance, but by care webs built in a coalition with those most affected by histories of erasure – queer youth, asexual people, sex workers, disabled folk Black trans femmes. As Hardy (2016) notes, these care webs are accountable to power, privilege, and the need to reimagine justice from the ground up. Sex Education is a battleground where the personal as political ignites change – and I dream of a time where it is a co-conspired archive of knowledge, pleasure, consent, grief, and embodiment.

At this intersection of human sexuality and sex education, social workers are not gatekeepers of respectability but guides of possibility, redefining how advocacy takes form. It becomes more than addressing and reforming policy, but building ecosystems where desire, abstinence, touch, and refusal can all coexist without shame. Here, advocacy does not come out of institutional frameworks, but is instead rooted in lived experience in ways that do not require emotional labor from those most experienced (Mendes et al., 2019). Sex education begins not in adolescence but in infancy – woven into how we name the body, respond to boundaries, and ask questions. It metamorphosizes into differing collectives, virtual platforms and technologies, and healing communities built for the ever-diversifying bodies and minds, including those who use ethical adult content to unlearn coercion where mainstream content has historically oppressed (Smith, 2015; Deponti et al., 2023). Future curricula centers the engagement process for differing types of relationship maintenance rather than solely normative processes, deconstructing binaries of good and bad sex, healthy and unhealthy desire, and legitimate and illegitimate bodies (Brown, 2022).

In this future, the health system as it relates to human sexuality and sex education is not something people survive. Agents in need and at the crux of harm shape it instead. Influenced by Zena Sharman's (2021) vision, care is not centralized in hospitals but distributed across networks of doulas, therapists, educators, and sexual technology developers who are accountable to their communities–not to profit (Hellinger, 2023; Silliman & Kearns, 2020). Clinics operate like cooperatives by sharing power among clients and providers. The notion of typical curricula is thrown out the door and the wide ranging identities people live and breathe take root in Black feminist epistemologies, disability justice principles, and queer relational ethics. There is no universal standard for care that puts those in need in a box, but many realms of care that are capable of making room for the array of agent needs.

Social workers engage in slow, iterative, relational work that asks the question of what kind of care does this person need–and who is the best person to provide it? As Reeder (2024) emphasizes, this requires irreverence, the courage to subvert carceral clinical norms, and the rejection of frameworks that devalue bodies deemed "unintelligible" by dominant systems (Iantaffi, 2020).

Consent is not reduced to paperwork; it is practiced relationally, repeatedly, and with consistent care. Systems do not hide behind neutrality but embrace subjectivity by recognizing that to serve is to be in relationship. Social work becomes a radical act of co-conspiring places where policy meets abstraction and social workers act as secondary curators for the futures of agents and communities, centering politics of pleasure, accountability, humility, and justice. This advocacy is deliberate and sustained, built on what Teles and Schmitt (2011) call "strategic capacity" or a commitment to adaptability, relational power, and long-term systems of change. Social work, in this world of wide ranging experiences of human sexuality and personal strides for sex education, is not merely a helping profession. It is a liberatory project.

References:

Brown, S. J. (2022). Refusing compulsory sexuality: A Black asexual lens on our sex-obsessed culture.

Deponti, I., Saukko, P., & Natale, S. (2023). Ideal technologies, ideal women: AI and gender imaginaries in Redditors' discussions on the Replika bot girlfriend. Media, Culture & Society, 45(4), 720-736. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221119021

Ferreira, S. B., & Ferreira, R. J. (2019). Fostering awareness of self in the education of social work students by means of critical reflectivity. Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk, 55(2). https://doi.org/10.15270/52-2-679

Hardy, K. V. (2016). Antiracist approaches for shaping theoretical and practice paradigms. In Strategies for deconstructing racism in the health and human services (pp. 125-140). Oxford University Press.

Hellinger, S. (Director). (2023). Money Shot: The Pornhub Story [Documentary]. Netflix.

Iantaffi, A. (2020). Gender trauma: Healing cultural, social, and historical gendered trauma. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Lorde, A. (1978). Uses of the erotic: The erotic as power. In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (pp. 339-343).

Mendes, K., Ringrose, J., & Keller, J. (2019). Feminist organizers' experiences of activism. In Digital feminist activism: Girls and women fight back against rape culture (pp. 171-193). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190697842.003.0009

Reeder, K. G. (2024). Questioning case studies: Subverting social work education and practice through a lens of queer irreverence. Studies in Clinical Social Work: Transforming Practice, Education and Research, 94(4), 362-380.

Sharman, Z. (2021). The care we dream of: Liberatory and transformative approaches to LGBTQ+ health. In The care we dream of (pp. 42-49). Arsenal Pulp Press.

Silliman, S., & Kearns, K. (2020). Intersectional approaches to teaching about privileges. Radical Teacher, 116, 47-54. https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2020.695

Smith, A. (2015). Ethical porn for dummies: A primer on feminist, queer, and inclusive porn. Tits and Sass.

Teles, S., & Schmitt, M. (2011). The elusive craft of evaluating advocacy. Stanford Social Innovation Review. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_elusive_craft_of_evaluating_advocacy